Decentralized Data Integrity Scheme for Preserving Privacy in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a dreamed vision of utility computing; users can now remotely store private information. However, this has also granted no physical possession of data outsourced to the cloud. Issues of data integrity and cloud accountability arise due to a lack of control. It is desirable to have a scheme that assures data owners of the correctness of information stored in the cloud without introducing huge computational or communication costs. Most existing schemes in the literature have achieved positive results in this regard. Most of the schemes either use blockchain technology which comes with its high energy consumption or assuming the trustworthiness of a third-party auditor. In this paper, we propose a Provable Data Possession scheme that is resistant to malicious auditors, resistant to key resilient exposure, and able to eliminate the issue of procrastinating auditors. The proposed protocol provides efficient auditing through a decentralized third-party to assure data owners of the integrity of data outsourced to the cloud. The main aim is to assure data owners of the integrity of data outsourced to the cloud without the need for a trusted or semi-honest entity. To show that our approach is completely privacy preserving, we instantiated three steps in the protocol: data initialization, verification, and sampling. The security analysis of the proposed approach proves to be secure, with a reduced computational and communicational cost.